Growing up, my uncle had a ‘pet’ goat, that is until it was dinner. Anyway, the damn thing ate anything and everything, it ate a rubber bracelet off my arm. It tried to eat my skirt. I know this is a common trait of goats, I just don’t know why. Any ideas?
I shit you not…
My aunt and uncle’s dog ate a saw blade made of diamond…(yes, they make them from diamonds…)
And she was fine…shaking head
Just off the top of my head, I’m guessing that goats originally evolved to live in scrubby, rather infertile areas where there wasn’t necessarily any high quality food around. I don’t think you had vast herds of ancestral goats grazing contenedly on rich, fertile plains someplace–they were tough little bastards who lived on rocky hillsides in semi-arid climates and ate the sort of plants that grow in places like that.
MEBuckner’s got it pretty much down pat. Where’s the only place you find goats in the wild? Mountains. Sheep, too. Bighorn sheep, mountain goats, what have you. All in places where the vegetation is scraggly and you need to get whatever nutrition you can out of whatever you find.
Even the domestic goats and sheep get herded out to the slopes during the summer (at least as far as I understand it). So basically they’re taking the habits they’ve gained through instinct and brought them off the mountains under domestication.
I tried to eat your skirt too. You didn’t seem very surprised by that!
Goats are browsers and will nibble at anything. They do this to discover whether they want to eat it. Since the sort of bark and scrub brush they find in the wild is generally odorless and does not give off taste by surface licking, they need to get the object into their mouth, mash it a bit with their teeth, perhaps letting their saliva work on it for a second, before they can determine whether it is edible.
And, since some of the things they eat are truly without taste, they will continue to eat many things (paper) that are not all that nutritious. The old cartoon schtick of having them eat tin cans comes from their habit of nibbling off the can labels–probably because the older glues for labels tasted as though they might be nutritious.
Goats are browsers and are occasionally blamed for turning the once-forested Afghan desert into a wasteland as they killed of trees by stripping their bark. (I don’t have independent confirmation of this story.)
Sheep eat grass. Goats only rarely eat grass. You can use sheep to keep your lawn short. Goats will simply destroy your best roses, privet, and vicary while your grass grows over their heads. On the other hand, goats will eat hay. :::shrug:::
Only the skirt? Or were you a bit off target?
A friend of mine had a couple of goats…once he threw an empty paint in the garbage. One of the goats ate paint chips off the inside of the can and died. Stupid goat.
My uncle had a goat for many years.
It ate the canvas strapping out of the lawn furniture.
It ate several roles of baling twine.
It ate the plastic lining for the swimming pool.
It ate some of the welcome mat.
It ate a significant portion of a bath towel.
It ate the hair of my cousin’s Barbie dolls.
This was over the course of two days.
There was more than enough grass around, not to mention the buckets of “goat food”.
It may have been bored with the goat food (or not liked that variety*), but, as noted above, goats don’t eat grass.
*For all that they will nibble or try anything, they can also be very picky eaters that will balk at a brand of pellets that they have decided to disdain.
I have decided that Tomndebb is not human. No person knows all he does.
Sua
I thought the whole reason for the cattle vs. sheep arguments in the midwest was that the sheep would eat too much of the grass (close to the roots), effectively killing it off. Whereas cattle would leave enough of the grass behind for it to survive.
Nah. The sheep would eat it off too close to the ground, killing the cattle off by starvation.
There are some varieties of grasses that the sheep will kill (usually in August), but sheep herding is still a big operation in several western states. The biggest problem was open range. The (originally Texan) cattlemen were used to letting their herds roam from round-up to round-up, at which time the stock would be gathered into a single herd and separated by brand (and the calves branded for the next year). When sheep were introduced to the same open ranges, they would crop down the grass too low for the cattle to eat, reducing the area available for the cattle to range. Actually, the issue had as much to do with personal prejudices as anything else. In California where each rancher controlled their own ranges, they used to run sheep and cattle on the same ranches without a problem. They did it to a lesser extent in New Mexico, as well.
(Sua, my farm-raised wife insists that she needs to keep in touch with her roots, so we raise goats on our <2 acres. (We had a sheep for a while, as well). Not all knowledge is acquired by choice.)